Posts Tagged 'Building'

It's basically a crescendo of applause in a crowd that starts with a single hand clap. A few seconds after that first clap, you hear the second. A slow rhythm takes shape. A few people join in. The rhythm is contagious, and it starts to spread through the crowd. As more people join in, the natural tendency is for the pace to speed up as the volume increases, and within about a minute, a single hand clap becomes a huge roar of applause. In the movie Rudy, one character starts a "slow clap" on the sideline of a football game, and the cheer ends up filling the entire stadium ... And that's the visual that comes to mind when I think about the upcoming "go live" date for our Singapore data center.

Start a slow clap in your mind and think of each successive milestone getting faster and exponentially louder applause:

From that press release, you learned that SoftLayer's Singapore data center will go live on October 3, 2011.

If you imagined correctly, the applause in your mind should be borderline deafening ... And I didn't even mention the fact that we enabled pre-orders on select servers in Singapore last week with a Triple Double special exclusively for servers in the new SNG01 facility.

AND I haven't said anything about the progress of our first European data center in Amsterdam. We already have a team of people there working to get that facility ready, and it's coming together just as quickly. Don't be surprised to see a few sneak peeks at the build-out process there in the next few weeks.

It's almost unfathomable that we're so close to the launch of our first facility outside the United States, and when you consider how quickly Amsterdam will come online after Singapore, you probably think you're taking crazy pills ... Or that we are. I don't want to take any of the wind out of the sales of our launch day, so I'm just going to share a few more glimpses into the data center.

On Monday, you can light your first server at the end of this Singaporean hallway:

All of the racks are powered:

The server rails are installed:

And we thought it might be a good idea to go ahead and install a few servers:

If you had the opportunity to listen to SoftLayer’s CEO, Lance Crosby, speak at this year’s Parallels Hosting Summit you definitely were able to obtain a key understanding as to his views on building solid companies in and through the hosting space. Some of the key points from Lance’s notes in regards to building sustainable businesses in the space were:

•Have a solid plan in place and use it as your guideline

•Create Systems that are scalable and metric driven

•Diversify the personnel and surround yourself with people that are experts in their functional areas and are sound characters. Don’t be a leader that thinks he is everything to all groups within the organization.

•Stop and look for mistakes, quickly correct the root problem and learn/adapt from those mistakes and repairs.

Lance’s message in his speech very closely aligns with a recent blog I read, “How to Build Your Own $23 Billion Company ,” which details the chairman of ASUS and his company’s ability to obtain significant market share in a once closed competitive environment, building a company from the ground up and with significant growth plans for the future. Jonney Shih, Chairman of ASUS, lays out his five rules that he believes are the basis for building any company, be it $500,000, $5,000,000 or $23,000,000,000 (as in the case of ASUS). Similarly to lance’s messages he states the following:

1)Sharpen the Sword – Build a plan and stick to it. Don’t jump from place to place. Have a focus and be the best at it that you can.

2)Ride the Right Wave – Seize the market opportunity. As Softlayer was able to seize the on-demand computing/virtualized data center market, ASUS was able to seize their market position in a time that built the foundation for their company to flourish.

3)Choose the right partners – Shih’s message of personnel is fundamental to his long term growth. “You need to really factor in their innate character,” Shih says. “You are going to work together for a lifetime, hopefully, and their character is as important as their technical knowledge.”

4)Recruit the best team leaders at the very beginning – As Lance’s speech mentions, the opportunity to build your company with a baseline of educated, experienced leaders with true functional, front line expertise will shape your organization for years to follow.

5)Drive the right strategy and confront the brutal facts – Not knowing the bad/ugly parts of business can compound these problems into downright disasters. Having people around you that are willing to look at mistakes with the idea to quickly correct these and move on will dramatically propel a company’s opportunity for longevity and growth. Ignoring things that can be addressed can only be negative in the long term.

Here at Softlayer, we have the good fortune to support many of the thriving hosting providers, VAR’s, managed service providers, and other niche based businesses that are gaining in both size and scale in the industry and really helping the hosting industry move from niche to mainstream. Many of these firms have humble roots such as Softlayer or ASUS in the example above. The key to continuing the mass adoption into the mainstream of the hosting space is to ensure that the leaders of the companies driving the growth are fundamentally sound and built on a proper foundation to achieve sustainable growth. SoftLayer’s groundwork has been laid to help support this growth throughout the industry. In our efforts to become the dominate force in the industry we hope that we have the opportunity to support the endeavors of those businesses and who knows, instead of ASUS, we may be talking about your company and how you have become the next $23,000,000,000 business.

I started working at the ripe’ole age of 16 and since then I’ve had 5 jobs including SoftLayer. I started off at “bullseye” which consisted of straightening merchandise shelves and onto being a cashier. For my second job, I moved on to harassing customers into purchasing leather from a well known mall leather supplier, but for some reason I was having extra-long chili cheese conies and bacon, egg and cheese toasters on my mind, so I made the move to “rollerskates” for job number three. These jobs gave me a decent income (for being 16-18 yrs old), but I knew I didn’t want to be hopping from job to job for the rest of my life… I needed to find a place to grow roots, a place that paid me what I was worth, and finally a place where growth within the company was available. So, I moved to the world of retail digital imaging (large format printing) with a local Dallas company. I started in the shipping and receiving department, slowly learning the whole production side of the company as I knew that is where I could grow. Four long years passed, roots in the company were set fairly deep, or so I thought and the opportunity was “kinda” there, but ultimately I was not happy.

The opportunity for me to work at SL came thru a friend and former colleague at the printing company, Shawna (thanks Shawna!) who left because she also saw the huge potential with SL. At the time I was so ready for something new, but I’ll have to admit, I was a bit reluctant to take the chance because of the four years I had invested, and my lack of knowledge in IT, and particularly SL, knowing that they were doing things that had never been done before (I did my homework). Needless to say I took the chance, and was hired on as an Infrastructure Engineer.

As an Infrastructure Engineer at SL responsibilities range from installing cage nuts, rails, filler panels all the way to installing Cisco switches and Ethernet cables. Basically making sure that the racks are ready to be populated with servers and sold to new or existing customers wanting to expand their business. I can only speak for myself, but there is a great sense of pride when you step back and look at all the live racks you just painstakingly set up, knowing the hard work you had invested was not only helping SL grow but knowing that I had taken a bigger step into starting a solid career.

Yes, I was hired on as an Infrastructure Engineer, but was not just limited to that position. I have been here for over 2 years already and having some of the best times of my life, the opportunities to advance are there, they look for it in their staff, they want me to succeed, knowing it only helps them to succeed as well. What’s next you ask? To be continued…